My recent focus on watching films from the 30s and 40s has helped me finish up various "best of lists." I've noticed, however, that I've inadvertently also been making a lot of headway finishing a movie list that really nobody watches, because it's full of not-very-good films: the list of top grossing films by year. You can use the worldwide or the domestic list, but they're largely the same and both are pretty awful. Up until the end of the '90s I guess you could make an argument that they at least represented some of the best filmmaking talents of each era, but starting in 1999 it's just been an endless stream of gigantic franchise films. Some of the recent box office winners are downright embarrassing in retrospect. "Shrek 2" was the highest grossing film of 2004? The live action "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" was the highest grossing film of 2000? What were we thinking?
Sure, there are some very good films that became the highest box office performers of various years. Nobody can challenge the bona fides of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "The Sound of Music," or "Rocky." However, the highest grossing film of any particular year was often the result of forces that went beyond whether or not a film was any good. Hype was almost always a big factor. Consider "Cleopatra," the box office winner of 1963, which was the most expensive film ever made up until that time. It is a gargantuan, four hour spectacle that got mixed reviews at the time of release, and has not aged well. That era also gave us 1966's highest grosser, "Hawaii," about a pair of humorless missionaries bringing Christianity to the islands, and 1958's "South Pacific," the garish adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about forbidden love in the tropics.
Then there are some downright weird outliers. The highest grossing film of 1952 was "This is Cinerama," and the highest grossing film of 1955 was its sequel, "Cinerama Holiday." Both were roadshow presentations designed to show off the widescreen Cinerama format, and consisted of first person POV shots of roller coasters and trips through foreign lands and natural scenery. They were technical demonstrations more than narrative films, and are almost impossible to view today in their original intended format. And I'll admit that this post was inspired in large part by my recent viewing of "Jolson Sings Again," the highest domestic grosser of 1949. It is a sequel to the 1946 Al Jolson biopic "The Jolson Story." It details Jolson's later years and comeback, stopping about every ten minutes for a pleasant song number. It ends with the main characters attending a screening of "The Jolson Story," and a medley of songs reprised from that movie. "Jolson Sings Again" often feels more like an Al Jolson tribute concert than a film proper, and offers nothing cinematically interesting whatsoever.
One interesting recent development in the list of worldwide top grossers is that we're seeing a shift to non-American films thanks to the pandemic. 2020's highest worldwide grosser was the "Demon Hunter" anime movie, and it looks like 2021's winner will be China's "The Battle of Lake Changjin," the most expensive Chinese film ever made. It's not clear if this trend will continue, as China continues to be jerks about keeping western films out of the lucrative Chinese market, but it's just another reason why nobody treats box office dominance as any measure of quality. Some of these movies have become so obscure that I've had to go out of my way to track them down, and they haven't had the amount of cultural impact that you'd expect. In 1951, the biblical epic "Quo Vadis" made more than twice as much as any other film, but isn't nearly as well remembered as other films from the same year, like "A Streetcar Named Desire," "An American in Paris," or Disney's "Alice in Wonderland." And though "Quo Vadis" is not a bad movie, it's pretty clear why.
As I continue on my merry way through the '30s and '40s, I'm watching the box office winners when I have the chance - a big part of this exercise is trying to get more historical context for the classics I've already seen, after all. However, too often I've found that historical context is pretty much all that these films offer.
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